RESTful output from AADL catalog

After a somewhat restful day… (groan)

In an effort to make the AADL catalog a little more accessible to developers, I’ve written a little bit of middleware that generates REST output from the catalog. Yes, we currently have RSS feeds directly from the catalog, but they are not suited for true development. REST output will allow developers to freely access both hitlist data and bibliographical data without having to do any funky scraping, parsing, or wand-waving.

Basically, you are just changing “seek” to “rest”. The base URI for the REST interface is http://www.aadl.org/cat/rest/ but going there without a query won’t get you much. Anyway, the output from the preceding looks like:

This data would be very easily accessible using something like PHP’s simpleXML. I think one of my next little side projects will be to write a class that accesses this and make it available for download here. Enjoy!

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Ed S., Yes, I’ve looked at it. It would be very cool to somehow adopt that standard, but due to some very real limitations with the access we have to our ILS, I don’t see that happening in a meaningful way. Opensearch would either require a robust implementation from the our vendor (III) or they need to provide the tools that would allow me to do it myself.

DC: From what I’ve read about unAPI, it’s a microformat standard, correct? (I may be way off base) I’m very interested in pursuing catalog microformats, especially if there is a standard already, which it looks like you’re working on. I’ll find you.
:)

OK, after a bit more work I managed to transform this output into something that adheres to the COINS standard for bibliography references. It’s not perfect (it just works on books) but a few people on #code4lib found that it validates.